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A word from the President - August 2018 (le français suit)

Dear RSC-Academy of Science colleagues,

I hope your summer has started well, and that you have lined up some fun activities besides shaping our future with your scholarly work.

I am very happy to announce that the Quebec Chapter of the Royal Society of Canada (Chapitre Québec de la Société Royale du Canada)was established on April 13 during an event held at the University of Québec at Montréal. We also used this historic moment to welcome, again the new inductees from Quebec. The breakfast meeting was followed by a roundtable discussion on potentials and collaborations to be explored within Quebec and Canada.

The RSC-AS participated in the summits of the Academies of Science of the G7 countries which were held between March 19 and May 24. The summit started with a symposium on “Advancing Gender Equity in Research” in Ottawa. Discussions focused on the status of access of girls to education, equity at the workplace, as well as sexual and reproductive health. A roadmap to enhance this important reality was adopted. An engagement paper has been published and is available here. The next summit was on April 26, and was focused on shaping our digital future. The importance of inclusion, access, a comprehensive educational plan, ethics, human values, employment, and training in achieving a digital future that is secure and available to all was acknowledged. The next meeting was a student-organized summit conference held at McGill University and at the OMNI Hotel in Montreal from May 16 to 17, and was focused on increasing public/student knowledge about the Arctic, and the roles of multinational cooperations and diplomacy in bringing Canada’s advances in science to the world. More importantly, the roles of students and young scientists in science diplomacy were highlighted. The last summit conference (May 23-24) was on Arctic sustainability for stemming climate change in the Arctic. It was agreed that there is a need for an evidence-based decision-making tool developed through research cooperation, individual training, collaborative databases, and in-situ monitoring. The joint statements of the Academies of Science of the G7 countries detailed comprehensive resolutions from the summit conferences on Arctic sustainability and on shaping our digital future can be read here.

As promised, I am including in this newsletter the excerpts/papers of three of the 2017 inductees that were presented at The Innovative Café at our AGM in November 2017. Two of the articles are very timely with respect to one of the topics of the science statements of the G7 Academies of Science on digital future. Shohini Ghose writes about the Quantum Information Revolution and what it means for us. Shohini breaks down the complexity of quantum information in lay terms and provides a context to explain how it is shaping our future. Please read the full article here. Barry Sanders takes the explanation of Quantum Information forward with illustrations of how the theory of quantum information is used to explain natural phenomena and to design systems. You will find the illustrations of the Schrödinger’s famous cat paradox particularly interesting! Please read the full article here. Understanding our past allows us to understand the present, therefore as the earth is changing with these technologies, we must not forget to continue our quest to understand its history and that’s what the last article by Kurt Konhauser focuses on. Kurt explains how his research uses information on trace elements and isotopic data from sedimentary rocks to get insight into evolutionary patterns. The transcript for Kurt’s presentation can be found here.

Until next time, I would like to wish you an excellent and productive summer!